Forty years after its 1958 debut, director/screenwriter/star Orson Welles' Touch of Evil is back on the big screen. Although it didn't fare well commercially when it first opened, critical, scholarly, and popular acclaim has earned the film noir classic status over the ensuing decades. Based on the novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson, Touch depicts a murder investigation in a small Texas border town by two conflicting police detectives, upright Mexican officer Vargas, played by Charlton Heston, and the evidence-planting, racist American Capt. Quinlan, portrayed by Welles himself. Janet Leigh also stars as Vargas' American wife Susan and Joseph Calleia has the pivotal role of Quinlan's idolizing, ultimately disillusioned partner Menzies.
Although Welles was widely hailed as a genius for Citizen Kane, by the late '50s the studios would only hire him as an actor, not a filmmaker. When Heston was approached by Universal to play Vargas, he was instrumental in getting them to accept Welles as Touch of Evil's director and writer. "That's one of the things I'm most proud of in my career," said the actor in a recent interview. "Well, to persuade a studio to provide the maker of Citizen Kane with the last film he made in America is something to be proud of. I was in Michigan, where I was raised--this was Christmastime with my family, and I took a couple of scripts along and one of them was Touch of Evil.
"And someone, I forget who, at the studio called me and said, 'Have you read the script?' I said, 'Well, it's pretty good. It's a police story and they've been doing police stories since The Great Train Robbery, so you're exploring a well-worn genre, but if you get a good picture, that's great. Who's directing?' They said, 'We don't have a director yet, but we've got Orson Welles to play the heavy.' And I said, 'Why don't you get him to direct? He's a pretty good director, you know.'"
Heston depicted a studio exec deep in thought: "'Yeah mmm to have him direct would be, uh, an interesting idea. We'll get back to you.' And I know when I hung up, they didn't say, 'Gee, that Chuck Heston is so smart,'"he laughed. "They said, 'Oh, Christ, that stupid actor. Oh, well, how bad can it be? What the hell.' So I can carry to my grave the act of having gotten Orson Welles to direct the last picture he did in this country."
Cut and Re-Cut
It is fairly well known that Welles was denied final cut. The version now in release is the fourth to be seen. Rick Schmidlin, who is credited as the re-edit producer of the current edition, explained why there were so many previous Touches.
"There was a preview version, that you saw in the film noir series that was just re-released and it's shown in most universities when requested. That was found in 1975 by Bob Epstein. It was shown once, to disastrous reviews, in 1958. It was then recut to a 96-minute version--that was the one seen in theatres when it was released, which was the version that basically everyone saw up until 1975. That same version had about 30 more seconds of extra scenes than the long preview version had. So home video, deciding they would make a super-long Orson Welles version, took the longest scenes from the short version and the longest scenes from the long version and made a super-long version. Orson Welles had said to someone once that he liked it because it had the extra scenes in it, even though it was not his cut. The studio said, 'He liked it!'" Schmidlin laughed. "So that was the stamp on the box, 'He liked it--Director's Cut.' That's where the three [earlier] versions come from."
The new version came about thanks to Schmidlin's persistence, he explained. "What happened was this: Four years ago, Universal said, 'We want to do special edition laser disks. What would you like to do?' Because I had produced a lot of projects for them previously on home video. And I said, 'Touch of Evil. I would like to address what elements exist on this film, go through your vaults, find out what documents exist, get Janet Leigh and Charlton Heston to do a commentary and find out the history of this film.' And I was told it was an uncommercial project and that there was not that much interest in the laser disk stores for this film. A friend of mine is president of Universal Home Video, Lewis Viola--he wasn't the one who made that statement, by the way--I kept on saying to Lewis every time we'd get together over the course of three and a half years, 'You know, you really should readdress Touch of Evil.' Finally, he said to me, 'I'm going into a meeting tomorrow with some executives in Theatrical and discuss Touch of Evil, and maybe they might be interested.' And I got a phone call that next afternoon saying, 'They're very excited.' And that's how it started."
The Magic Memo
Welles had died in 1985, but he still may have had the last word on the editing of Touch of Evil, thanks to a 58-page memo he wrote detailing changes he wanted in the cut Universal originally released. The memo first came to Schmidlin's attention when an abbreviated version was published in 1992 in Film Quarterly magazine.
"What I did," Schmidlin revealed, "was I took a version of the home video to a friend of mine's Avid [editing equipment], and I played around with a couple of edits. And I realized that all the sound edits were working and the picture edits were working--it was making sense. So I gave that with my notes to Universal and said, 'Look! This works! And it's better!' They were very happy--I've never seen that tape again, though," he laughed.
Once Universal became interested in a theatrical release of a newly edited version, then-studio chief Lew Wasserman procured a copy of the entire document for Schmidlin. Acquiring the full memo turned out to be only the beginning, however. "They gave the greenlight for a theatrical [edition]," Schmidlin recalled. "I have a meeting in the [Universal] Tower with seven big players. In 10 minutes, they say, 'You can go and do it.' And I'm looking at these guys, going, 'Is this a green light?' Now you go through the studio process where they bring you down to Editorial and the head of Editorial says, 'Okay, we can get you Cutting Room 6 in three, four weeks, and we'll assign you this editor--he's not crazy anymore."
This last assurance struck Schmidlin as more alarming than comforting. "When I walked out of there," he related, "I was with Bob O'Neil, head of the vault services, preservation, he did a lot of work on this project--I said to Bob, 'Do I have choice of editor?' He said, 'Well, not unless you come up with someone really good.' I had just been to a lecture at the L.A. County Museum where I heard Walter Murch speak. I consider Walter one of the finest editors in the industry." Murch's credits include The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, and The English Patient.
"I didn't know Walter," Schmidlin said. "I called him out of the blue and I pleaded with him to see if he'd be interested in the project. I needed Walter Murch to understand the intellect of Welles. I figured I'd take two great minds and put them together. Welles spends four pages [in the memo] discussing different ways to do an editorial change in separating the scene of the explosion and the scene of the hotel with Grandi [Akim Tamiroff] and Susan. I thought I needed someone of Walter's intellect to understand and decipher exactly the way Welles would have intended it to be done in the best possible situation, and not do it the fast, easy way like I did on the Avid.
"The amazing thing is, after three weeks up in Salinas at Walter's cutting this film, we'd done it piece by piece, but we had not watched the movie from beginning to end since we had first watched it in its previous form. We didn't know if [the new cut] was going to be any more artistic, quirkier, or really incoherent, as the studio thought it was [in 1958]. And what we found was a more commercially accessible movie, a movie that was easier to follow, a movie where the plot points were made much clearer than they had previously been done, and that's all that Welles was asking for. He was asking for clarification, he was asking to make this film play. He was not asking to make this film more confusing or arty. He wanted everybody to enjoy it."
Genius Stifled
Leigh said, "I knew that the studio was fiddling around, because we had to go back and do some retakes that neither of us [Leigh and Heston] really wanted to do but contractually we had to. What [the studio] wanted was just to kind of round out a smoother kind of movie, which of course this was not meant to be. So I knew that obviously they were going to make it a little different from what we had hoped or thought it was going to be. When I saw it initially, I liked it and I appreciated it--I did miss some of the sharpness that should have been there. When I saw the re-edited version, the restored version, I was so excited, because I saw the movie that [Welles] had envisioned, I saw what he meant to say. It wasn't Mr. Blanding's Dream House. This was a rough, tough, jab 'em, shake 'em kind of movie. That's what I saw. And I was very happy. I really was quite emotional about it."
Heston feels that the essence of Touch of Evil remains intact in the re-edit. "The changes I perceive are not that many. Some of them are things Orson wanted in and they did put in, but we're not talking about a restructuring of the whole film, we're not talking about a wreck that they somehow put wheels on. I'm delighted with the film as it stands--I was pleased with the film when we made it. I think the most noticeable change is taking the opening credits off that great--by now, iconographic--shot with the Chapman boom. It vastly improves the opening of the picture."
The first day of shooting involved an extraordinarily complex, lengthy shot that follows the volatile Quinlan and Vargas through a suspect's apartment. "Orson rehearsed the principal players the day before we started," Heston said. "And he didn't turn a camera on until two in the afternoon. The guys from the studio were standing in corners going, 'Auggh!' And then he started shooting, and he did about 10, 12 takes. By that time, it was nearly six o'clock. We'd just about blown the whole day and he finally said, 'Cut. Print that, that's a wrap on this scene, and we're now three days ahead of schedule.'
"He was marvelous with actors," Heston added. "Crews, too. Studio heads, not so good," he laughed ruefully. "That's a mistake--those are the kind you've got to keep on your side. Anyway, one day Orson said to me," Heston dropped his voice to recreate Welles' bass tones, "'You know, Chuck, all of us with deep bass voices love to rumble through a scene. You have to learn to use your tenor range.' And I have tried to follow that ever since. This was something I learned, too--down at the canal, we shot three or four nights and then finally finished. It was by then 6:30 in the morning, so Orson and I stopped at some diner to get some breakfast.
"Orson had a bottle of champagne, which was nice, and we sat having eggs, and telling each other how wonderful we were, and I finally said, 'You know, Orson, this has been a wonderful experience for me. I've learned a great deal and I think you've got a wonderful picture, and I'm very proud to be in it. But you only made one mistake.' 'What is that, my boy?' He always called me, 'My boy.' And I said, 'There are two or three very short bits in shooting this--I don't think they'll make the cut--that are there really just to show that I have the leading role. I don't have the leading role. Captain Quinlan is what this movie's about. But I knew that.' And he said, 'Well, then we don't have to worry about it in the cutting, do we?'" Heston laughed.
Genius Restored
Leigh remembers the sense of excitement Welles brought to the set.
"You felt his presence, you felt his strength," she said. "And because of that strength, because of that security, he was able to allow the input from everybody. That's why you had such wild, wonderful characters that were never written in the script. I mean, in the script, the motel keeper was nothing. And all of a sudden Dennis Weaver comes up with this gem. And Marlene Dietrich's role was, again, hardly anything, but it grew into this wonderful character. A lot of it was fleshed out in rehearsal, because we just scoured all the edges [of the script] and everything that could be gotten out of it, the characters and the scenes. He commanded that [creativity] from you. Not in words, not 'commanded' in an 'ordered' way, but he just expected it and you wanted to give it. That's what was so exciting about working with him."
She contrasted Welles' style with that of Alfred Hitchcock, who later directed her in Psycho: "I think that Mr. Hitchcock's biggest thrill was before the movie started, because that's when he did his creating," she said. "He then sort of turned it over to the people who played in his pictures, but the real challenge for him was in the beginning, I believe, when he was plotting, because it was so economically, carefully planned, so that each frame had a meaning. There wasn't one wasted frame in his movies, which really lent to the suspense and excitement. So I think that was more fun for him. Because on the set, then, his job was really done."
With Welles, she said, "Nothing was ever mundane, nothing was ever boring, nothing was ever ordinary. It was always more than ordinary. I think he loved to surprise us by who was going to be on the set that day. We would never know who was coming by to do a cameo, because he kept that to himself until the moment. And just the general excitement of what he was doing permeated everyone. He truly enjoyed doing this. He lived when he did this."
Citing Welles' attitude toward Leigh's character specifically and the overall themes of Touch of Evil, the actress said, "He was very ahead of his time. Susan was never a victim. She was a very modern woman, and especially for that time. She was independent, she was feisty, she was not intimidated by the Grandis [gangster clan] or anybody else, and I imagine that as a wife she would be pretty feisty. I don't think she'd take any stuff from her husband, and I imagine she was a very passionate woman. I have a feeling that she came from kind of a socialite kind of family who at that time may possibly have frowned on a mixed marriage, and she would have been the one to say, 'I don't care what you think, I'm going to do what I want.' This is what I think Orson addressed in the movie before it was fashionable to do so. I mean, he addressed all sorts of things. Quinlan's attitude toward Vargas and having Susan be a modern woman--there's drugs involved and gangs and rape--it's very today."
Schmidlin readily acknowledged that for him, producing the re-edit was a dream come true: "You have something you want to do, you believe in it, and you do it. And you get blessed enough to do it right by having the right people to work with, and I mean, even right now, it's a very emotional thing sitting at a table with you guys, because it's like, something's happened. It worked. Everyone has been very gracious about what was done here. I think it's because they knew it was done with care, it was done with respect, and I hope everyone feels that we've done it right. I constantly would tell Walter, 'If Walter Murch does what Welles wants, then maybe we'll have a Welles film.' And we're giving it out now to another group of people who are now going to read about it and understand it. It's very humbling and very weird emotionally. It's awe-inspiring. It's a cinematic journey." BSW/D-L